Merseyside Miners Support Groups 1984/5

Mike Field interviewed by Ritchie Hunter 31.01.05

I was 22 in 1984 and had been involved in the peace movement as secretary of Youth CND on Merseyside. So I was already politically active; I had had some politicisation anyway. Through CND I had met feminists and come across the Anti-Apartheid Movement, so there was a lot going on at the time. Being in CND you got varying views from different parts of society. I wasn’t involved in the trade union movement as such. Seeing the miners strike on the telly, I thought it [the shutting of mines] was wrong but didn’t, at first, think too much about it. I had heard Scargill speak before, and I really liked Scargill at the time. It was Christmas, the strike was just carrying on and you could see the miners getting badly treated and I think there was a wider feeling that we have got to do something; we just can’t sit and watch this.

I can’t remember who actually proposed the starting of the Miners Support Group. I was in Old Swan and meetings were held in the Cattle Market pub (there was two and I don’t know which one) starting of fortnightly and then weekly. There was people from the Labour Party, there was people who were in the Labour Party but from Militant, there were people from the SWP, and there were probably an equal number of people who were not politicised or members of political parties.

This support group linked up with other support groups throughout the city in a very similar way that CND organised, with local groups with a co-ordinating body. That, to me, was a very good way of organising. The main thing we did was collections in our high street. These started weekly, but got to be every day. The group itself just self organised and we tried to put our various ideas on what to do into action.
We made leaflets to leaflet outside Plesseys in Edge Lane. We would stand there at 6 o’clock in the morning in the freezing cold.

I had nothing to do with trade unions or work beforehand, but the whole thing brought a big consciousness of class and the groups became a platform for talks, not just about the miners, but many other things. Maybe after the main business of the miners had been discussed then other things would come in. We may argue over historical things or whatever, but there was a lot of education going on; and a lot of practical organising. People were working together without a hierarchy. We had a Chair and treasurer that would swap round. It was organised without permanent positions of power.

We organised a public meeting where a guy came along from the RCP and he had a big bag with all the stuff he wanted to sell. He stood up at this packed public meeting and he said, “What we should be doing, is not public meetings. We should be getting involved with the workers and the unions”. In his theoretical approach he didn’t realise that the two weeks leading up to the meeting that was what we had been doing to get people for the meeting. Not just trade unionists, but that was one of the things we had been doing. We had been to the bus depots, to Plesseys, to all the workplaces around our area and spoke to TU officials and publicised the meeting and did they want to speak. It was funny that someone would come along with this revolutionary conceptual thing and to think that we didn’t know about it and tell us from their intellectualised what we should be doing and we had been doing it and we knew much more practically the pros and cons of doing it.

One of the group, who I got on with and liked, was really enthusiastically into Militant, which was no problem for me, but it was part of that culture of these groups, one of the primary reasons at first, to come to these meetings to recruit. We discussed it and said it was fine.

We are all subject to the society we are living in and there is a lot of sectarianism just because of the competitiveness of the culture. In our group we dealt with this all right, we all got on despite party differences. Coming from an anarchist background, if I had any sectarianism at all it was against the hierarchy and for the rank and file.

We had a debate over whether to take the money to a central point like Hardman St. and they would distribute it, or if we, as a local branch, should be more autonomous and take it directly to a pit. I can see the relevancy of both options. We chose the second option, as being part of our thing of being direct. Taking direct action, giving direct mutual aid and not part of a bureaucracy, even if it was a benign bureaucracy if you like. We went to Parkgate in St Helen’s.

We also had a lot of discussions about what was going on in our city at the time. The Liverpool council dispute, which now I hear of in the local media as the ‘Dark Days’, as a 22 year old, it wasn’t the ‘Dark’ at all. One of things I’m proud of in Liverpool is that we stood up against Margaret Thatcher, more than any other city, and we got really damaged badly for doing that, for putting our heads above the parapet; and we got the strike of the Hattons after the strike of labour. I think that people in the peace movement and particularly of the left in this city should be applauded for fighting against the system of greed. Everyone can now see what was happening. It wasn’t so much the ‘Dark Days’ in Liverpool because we really did fight and I’m proud of that.

My one regret about it was that it didn’t continue. Because people went back to their parties when it ended, and there wasn’t that self-organised community group which was politicised and gained an interest in each other by doing all of these things. Not that they shouldn’t have been members of parties, that wasn’t the problem, they should’ve carried on their party work in this organisation, because it was community based.

There was all these really great people who met each other; that was another thing. Relationships and friendships were made that exist now in the city. Springing from our group there were other things that people became involved in as well, such as Voxy Theatre. So I got involved in Voxy Theatre as well. We used to do fundraising socials. Once we played in Rhyl. We did comedies and played music bringing money in to get to the miners. It really took over a lot of your life at the time, but then I was unemployed, so that was another reason I had time to do those things.

I felt gutted when it ended, like I did when the Dockers strike ended. It is part of the reason now, twenty years later, that the lack of community has been established by atomising people and destroying their solidarity. That’s why there’s no community space. That’s what was up for grabs in that fight. I don’t think solidarity has gone away, it is just having to take a breather.